Strategies to Teach Whiteness and Cultural Humility among MSW Students using Podcast-Facilitated Course Work

Overview: This interactive workshop will describe the innovative process of listening to podcasts as a teaching strategy to help MSW students unpack how systems and institutions of white dominance impact the social work profession. Students develop the cultural humility needed to meet their ethical obligations and professional competencies through this process.Proposal text: Social work faculty must prepare future social workers to practice in a diverse and polarizing social and political environment. Our NASW Code of Ethics Standard 1.05 Cultural Awareness and Cultural Diversity (c) where "Social workers should demonstrate awareness and cultural humility by engaging in critical self-reflection (understanding their own bias and engaging in self-correction), recognizing clients as experts of their own culture, committing to lifelong learning, and holding institutions accountable for advancing cultural humility". Additionally the 2022 draft of the CSWE EPAS includes explicit language about anti-racism and the pervasive impact of white supremacy. To uphold these standards, white students, in particular, need to unpack their white privilege (Abrams & Moio, 2009; DiAngelo, 2011; Tochluk, 2010) to develop cultural humility, social justice position and antiracist practice skills required to understand how white supremacy impacts interactions with individuals and systems at home and abroad. However, when given the space to explore their privilege, white students often experience personal guilt, uneasiness, and defensiveness, described by DiAngelo (2011) as "white fragility." This fragility manifests itself in the classroom as defensiveness, denial, deflection, and anger towards faculty members asking them to examine their whiteness.
As an African American faculty member teaching diversity courses at a predominantly white institution (PWI), I have seen firsthand how white students can intellectually reproduce and recite information about racialized groups but struggle to understand how they have been socialized to not have to notice, name, or acknowledge the unexamined privileges of their whiteness. This interactive workshop will describe how I use a 15-episode podcast, Seeing White (Biewen, 2017), in an MSW diversity course to help students manage their fragility and sit in that uncomfortable space needed to hear the experiences of people of color that are dissonant with their socialization as a white person.
Seeing White is narrated by white radio host and producer John Biewen. In the series, Biewen examines "where the notion whiteness comes from, what it means, and what whiteness is for?" With the help of leading racial identity scholars and historians, they engage, unpack, and discover the purposely untold history of race in America. Throughout the series, Biewen is talking with Chenjerai Kumanyika, a colleague of color and professor of critical cultural media studies that is helping him unpack his own whiteness.
I will describe the interactive online discussion posts unpacking process that helped them engage in a critical self-reflective process and connect with the social work profession. Additionally, how to engage student discussion themes and reflections from listening in a student-facilitated large group discussion format to link them to their social work ethical obligations and professional competencies.
During the workshop, I will engage participants by 1) providing a brief overview of the content in the podcast episodes; 2) playing select podcast clips and having participants respond to sample writing prompts; and 3) discuss the challenges of teaching this content. I will end the workshop with a large group debriefing dialogue and a question-and-answer period.